A few months ago, I wrote an article about comments, in which I said, among others things, that Twitter can never replace comments because not only is it effectively a one-to-one communication channel, Twitter messages are also far too short to foster any form of coherent conversation. Over the weekend, a silly link-bait story illustrated my point perfectly.

I live in The Netherlands and I gave my first generation Apple TV to my son, have the second generation Apple TV in the bedroom and the third generation Apple TV should arrive today or tomorrow and will be placed in the living room.

The Apple TV was a nice device until they removed the hard drive from it. Why would I want a device for my home theater only to have to keep iTunes running on my computer to access my media? It made sense when it was an iPod with streaming services, without the on-board storage though I don't really see a use for it in my setup.

As the device has a USB port it would have made sense to allow the user to attach some storage to it. This would keep the price of the device down, while allowing the customer total freedom wether or not to attach storage to it and if so how much.

I'm exactly the opposite. Why would I want a harddrive in the media player and having to worry about managing copies of media all around the house, when I can just stream from the media server in the basement?

Sure, you need a decent network connection throughout the house, but it's not that hard to run CAT5/CAT6 cabling behind the baseboards. And multi-stream 802.11n is "good enough" to stream XviD/x264 streams up to 720p (maybe even 1080p?).

So why do you need local storage in each media player? That's the point of a media server.